Mentorship in the life of young entrepreneurs (2)

OLUFEMI ADEDAMOLA OYEDELE

Olufemi Adedamola Oyedele, MPhil. in Construction Management, managing director/CEO, Fame Oyster & Co. Nigeria, is an expert in real estate investment, a registered estate surveyor and valuer, and an experienced construction project manager. He can be reached on +2348137564200 (text only) or femoyede@gmail.com  

Continued from last week.

Still, even as structured, formalised mentoring programmes began to proliferate (also seen in medicine during this era, as exemplified by the relationship between William Halsted, William Osler, and Harvey Cushing, three leading turn-of-the-century surgeons), the traditional command-and-control model of workplace relations predominated. It is difficult to verify exactly when the first formal mentorship programme was instituted in a corporate setting, although it appears that a couple of decades after the launch of Big Brothers, General Electric introduced a work-study plan which paired junior engineers in the company with more experienced mentors who could offer technical and professional advice. 

There is clearly something intuitive about mentoring. It is modelled on an ancient expert-and-novice relationship, where young people learned a trade by shadowing a master. As has been seen, mentors and mentees often gravitate towards each other organically regardless of their social/professional context. Indeed, a 2022 study found that even criminals seek out mentors and identify mentees regularly! A majority of incarcerated individuals interviewed in the study had had access to some kind of mentoring relationship. However, despite early 20th century efforts to formalise mentoring programmes, it was not until the middle of the 20th century that businesses really started to consider mentorship as a highly effective workplace tool. This began with a suite of pioneering studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Arthur Chickering’s 1969 research demonstrated that mentor-mentee style interactions between students and faculty contributed to intellectual development and more positive self-perception on the part of the students.

Daniel Levinson’s book-length examination of adult development concurred with Chickering’s assessment of the positive effects of mentoring. Levinson revealed that the most effective tool young adults have access to in shaping their transition to adulthood is a productive mentoring relationship. By the 1980s, studies such as Kathy Kram’s investigation of 18 workplace mentor – protégé dyads revealed that these strengths could be applied in business contexts as well. Mentoring then began to gain a foothold in the public consciousness through articles in popular publications like the Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal which surveyed top corporate executives on mentoring relationships. These executives credited their professional success to mentors at various stages of their career.

In the following decades, interest in mentoring surged. It is difficult to establish exactly when companies began to encourage workplace mentorship, but some examples include IBM, which connected senior executives with high-potential employees and Hewlett-Packard which paired employees from different departments and with different skill sets in order to increase cross-functional knowledge – both efforts were launched in the 1980s. The traditional senior-junior mentoring model began to shift in the 2000s as peer-to-peer mentoring, reverse mentoring, and group mentoring emerged as ways to share knowledge in novel and productive ways. Now, mentoring is recognised as a proven method for achieving personal growth, professional development, and workplace success. Recognising the historical importance of knowledge sharing, Pollinate Networks strives to improve employee engagement, foster more productive businesses, and create healthier workplace cultures through mentorship programmes in a range of environments and for a variety of audiences.

There are five fundamental stages of mentorship: (1) Contemplation: At this stage the mentor and mentee will size each other up and decide whether to go along or not. (2) Initiation: This is the stage when the mentee is initiated into the business. The mentor painstakingly introduces the mentee into the rudiments and finally, nifty-gritty of the business. (3) Facilitating growth and maintenance: This is the stage where the mentor supports the mentee and monitors his growth. (4) Decline and dissolution: After the mentee has shown signs of independence, the mentor will let him be on his own and dissolve the relationship. (5) Redefinition: Mentor/mentee relationship surpasses business tenure. There are mentors and mentees whose relationship transformed into godfather and godson relationship. No two mentor/mentee relationships are the same, but these five stages form a fundamental framework of mentorship.

The 3C’s of mentoring are clarity, communication and commitment. (1) Clarity means that a mentor must be clear about his mission and transfer the skill of business to the mentee as simply as possible. (2) Communication is life. The mentor must communicate effectively with the mentee so that he can gain as much as possible from the mentorship. (3) Commitment is the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, event or project. The mentor and the mentee must be committed to the relationship. 

Advantages of mentorship are: (i) Mentees gain skills and knowledge from the mentor; (ii) Mentors support graduate-mentees financially, materially and ensure their growth in the course of the business; (iii) Some mentors help their graduate-mentees in marketing their products, (iv) Mentor/mentee relationship is a win-win arrangement as the mentor gain more knowledge and confidence while tutoring the mentee.

Nine Nigerian start-ups that collectively raised over $70 million in the last two years shut down in 2023. The closures have raised concerns about the faith of other young and innovative companies seeking funding in the coming years. While the companies shut down under different circumstances, Venture Capitalists (VCs) argued that many of the failed start-ups received adequate funding without sufficient due diligence. The VCs also suggest that past investment decisions were rushed, emphasising the need for start-ups to demonstrate stronger viability and meet higher standards before securing investment in the future. It is glaring that these start-ups lacked management acumen and were not tutored to survive the teething stage of business. All start-up owners need confidence to be able to stand on their own. Mentorship is the best step to ensure that start-ups do not die premature death. The Federal Ministry of Trade and Investment and ministries of wealth creation, commerce and industry in the states, must design apprenticeship schemes for their youths.

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